"A--yes--but the cases are different; there's a difference, about it. As I said in the debate on the Jewish Disabilities, there arc no two cases, about it, precisely parallel; and I've given my serious consideration to the subject, and I am satisfied that for every reason you ought to choose a wife _immediately_; there's _no_ reason against it, and you ought to choose a wife, about it, immediately; and my mind is made up quite decidedly, and I have spoken repeatedly; but now I tell you I recognise no reason for further delay--no reason against the step, and every reason for it; and in short, I shall have no choice but to treat any dilatory procedure in the matter as amounting to a distinct trifling with my known wishes, desire, and opinion."
And the Right Hon. Lord Viscount Verney smote his thin hand emphatically at these words, upon the table, as he used to do in his place in the House.
Then followed an impressive silence, the peer holding his head high, and looking a little flushed; and Cleve very pale, with the ghost of the smile he had worn a few minutes before.
There are instruments that detect and measure with a beautiful accuracy, the presence and force of invisible influences--heat, electricity, air, moisture. If among all these "meters"--electronometers, hygrometers, anemometers--an _odynometer_, to detect the presence and measure the intensity of hidden _pain_, were procurable, and applied to the breast of that pale, smiling young man at that moment, I wonder to what degree in its scale its index would have pointed!
Cleve intended to make some slight and playful remark, he knew not what, but his voice failed him.
He had been thinking of this possibility--of this _hour_--for many a day, as some men will of the Day of Judgment, and putting it aside as a hateful thought, possibly never to be embodied in _fact_, and here it was come upon him, suddenly, inevitably, in all its terrors.
"Well, certainly, uncle,--as you wish it. I must look about me--seriously. I know you wish me to be happy. I'm very grateful; you have always bestowed so much of your thought and care upon me--_too_ good, a great deal."
So spoke the young man--white as that sheet of paper on which his uncle had been pencilling two or three of what he called his thoughts--and almost as unconscious of the import of the words he repeated.